Getting Started with Maven

Editor's Note: About the tenth time you write the same Ant targets to compile your code, JAR or WAR it, generate Javadocs, etc., you surely must wonder if there's a less tedious way to do things. Maven offers an alternative, by moving your concerns up from the task level to the project-management level: Maven projects already know how to build and bundle code, run tests, generate documentation, and host a project web page.

O'Reilly's Maven: A Developer's Notebook helps you get your projects up and running quickly, and then offers an in-depth survey of Maven's more advanced features, like its plugins and support for team collaboration. In the sample chapter "Maven Jump-Start" (656K PDF), authors Vincent Massol and Timothy M. O'Brien show you how to install Maven, kick off your first build, and start investigating its features for integrating with IDEs and source control systems.

Vincent Massol is the creator of the Jakarta Cactus
framework and an active member of the Maven project since the early days. After having spent four years as a technical architect on several major projects (mostly J2EE), Vincent is now the co-founder and CTO of Pivolis, a company specializing in applying agile methodologies to offshore software development. He lives in the City of Light, Paris, France and can be found online at www.massol.net.

Timothy M. O'Brien is a developer and entrepreneur living in Chicago, IL. He spends his days programming in Java, Python, and Ruby.